Weather blog: Hurricane season 2010 long range forecast numbers

The UKMet office in England has issued their forecast for the Atlantic hurricane season 2010.

UKMet is Great Britain's version of our National Weather Service. They have a different computer forecasting scheme that is totally different from the long-range methods used by Colorado State University's Dr. Gray and Dr. Klotzbach. The UKMet Office forecast has shown some skill in the last two seasons.

Florida State University and Penn State University, both outstanding meteorology schools, have also issued a forecast. I guess they can't let Colorado State continue to get all of the publicity. FSU got a grant from NOAA to develop their scheme.

 Here are the numbers:

One thing stands out by looking at these numbers. Even with different forecasting schemes, they all come to pretty much the same conclusion, an active season.

The forecasters are putting a great deal into the very warm Atlantic sea surface temperatures and the development of La Nina in the Pacific.

Remember, we've already had one named storm and one hurricane. But in the hyper-active 2005 season we were on the "E" storm by this point with two major hurricanes already (Dennis and Emily).

In the busy 2004 season, we didn't even have the first named storm until July 31. So, let's take it a few days at a time and see what happens. Just because July has been inactive, is no reason to let your guard down.